After Work
There are days the factory takes everything.
There are days the factory takes everything. Not just the hours. The hours you can plan around. It takes the thinking too, the part of your brain that strings ideas together and knows what to do next. You drive home on the route you’ve driven a hundred times and park where you always park and somewhere between the car door and the kitchen you lose the thread of whatever you were going to do next. Tonight is one of those nights.
I’ve been at this long enough to know that showing up tired still counts. The post that gets written on fumes is still a post. The day you dragged yourself to the wheel and centered one pound of clay before giving up is still a day you touched the clay. Resistance doesn’t care how tired you are. It will take exhaustion as an excuse just as fast as it takes fear or distraction or a full schedule. The only answer I’ve ever found is to do something small and let that be enough. So this is the small thing tonight.
I think about the kiln sitting out there in the dark. The arch waiting on me. The tatami bricks I haven’t laid yet. The garden my wife and I put in this weekend that is out there in the ground right now doing its quiet work whether I’m watching it or not. That’s the thing about seeds and kilns and the slow projects. They don’t need you every minute. They just need you to come back.
I’ll come back tomorrow. Rested, or close enough to it. There will be clay to move and bricks to lay and a post worth writing about something other than being tired. But tonight this is what I’ve got, and I’ve learned not to apologize for that.
Some days the factory gets the best of you. The studio gets what’s left. That’s the deal you make when you live two lives in one body, and most of the time it’s a deal worth making.
If I were living yesterday a second time: Rest is not quitting. It is preparation.
Things I am grateful for: My wife, who understands this life and never once made me feel guilty for being tired. The fact that tomorrow exists.
If I get to live to be 86, I might only have: 12,684 days left. One of them just went toward keeping the writing alive on nothing but grit and the good sense to keep it short.
Originally published at Creek Road Pottery
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